COLIN GUY

Published 12:00 am, Sunday, November 2, 2008

KBTV Photographers Jeremy Crocker and Allen Rienstra film the outside of the studio for a Wednesday night news segment to cover the station's switch from being an NBC affiliate to Fox. Thursday, October 29, 2008
Guiseppe Barranco/The Enterprise

Beaumont residents will not miss out on the Super Bowl next February, a spokeswoman with NBC Universal said Friday.

The Enterprise reported earlier this week that KBTV Channel 4, the current NBC affiliate, will become a Fox Broad-casting Co. affiliate starting Jan. 1, 2009, one month before the 43rd Super Bowl, set to be broadcast by NBC.

"We are currently evaluating our options and being thoughtful to the area's residents," NBC Universal spokeswoman Kathy Kelly-Brown told The Enterprise by phone. "Rest assured the Super Bowl and all of our other great programming will continue to be seen in the Beaumont community."

One possibility could be for KUIL-TV Channel 64, the local Fox affiliate, to become the new NBC affiliate.

On the local Time Warner cable menu, KUIL occupies Channel 11.

KUIL has been aggressively pursuing an affiliation agreement with NBC since learning about Fox's intent to switch to KBTV, according to Madelyn Bonnot, vice president of operations for Bluebonnet Communications, Inc., the station's parent company.

Bonnot, who spoke to The Enterprise by phone from New Orleans, said she expects NBC will move swiftly to estab-lish an agreement with a station in the Beaumont market.

"I would think they absolutely need a new home and partner by (Jan 1, 2009)," she said.

If KUIL makes the jump to NBC, she said, the station can continue to air syndicated episodes of programs such as Family Guy, House and Boston Legal. It may have to scale back how much locally scheduled content is aired, however, because NBC would be providing more primetime content to the station than Fox.

Bonnot said KUIL's sister station in Lake Charles began broadcasting Fox content to the Beaumont market 19 years ago, and KUIL has been broadcasting it locally for six years.

The network's decision to switch affiliates came as a shock, she said.

Brian Jones, executive vice president of Irving-based Nextar Broadcasting Group, the company that owns KBTV, told The Enterprise Oct. 24 that there will be programming changes made at the station that officials are currently working on, according to The Enterprise's archives. He added that they anticipate a robust local news presence and plan to con-tinue their commitment to serving Southeast Texas.

Whatever KUIL decides to do, it won't have to jump any federal hurdles. A spokesman with the Federal Communica-tions Commission said the decision for a television station to affiliate with a particular network is between the two and requires no governmental approval.

Gary Underwood, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable, said by phone that he expects an announcement will be made soon concerning how NBC content will reach viewers after KBTV makes the switch to Fox.

If necessary, according to Underwood, it is possible for a cable carrier to transmit a network's program content from a station in another market if it receives permission.

There have been instances in the past where Southeast Texans were unable to watch certain football games, though for reasons other than the absence of a network affiliate.

Last December a hotly anticipated game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers was unavailable to Time Warner Cable subscribers in the area because it was available only on the NFL Network, a channel Time Warner did not carry then, according to The Enterprise's archives.

In the fall of 1993 TCI cable television subscribers found that "Monday Night Football" had been replaced with in-fomercials, according to The Enterprise's archives. TCI dropped ABC from its lineup in early October after negotiators were unable to reach a re-transmission consent agreement.